‘Death and the Mother’

Copenhagen is a city filled with homages to Denmark’s most prominent storyteller, Hans Christian Andersen, from the Little Mermaid to numerous statues of the author himself. Less known is the sculpture outside St. Peter’s Church, which is based on an obscure fairy tale titled “The Story of a Mother.”

Created by Niels Hansen Jacobsen in 1892, the sculpture depicts a grim reaper striding over a mother, crouching on the ground and grieving for her dead child.

In the story, the mother has been taking care of her sick child for three days without sleep. Just when she closes her eyes for a moment, Death comes and takes her child. Frantic, the mother goes through a series of ordeals to find her child, but when she does and attempts to negotiate with Death, the latter shows her the futures of two children, one filled with happiness and other full of misery. Death says that one of these would be her child’s future, were it to live. The mother prays and leaves it to God’s will; Death goes away, carrying the child into the unknown.

In 1901, Jacobsen was commissioned to make a bronze cast of his Death and the Mother, which would be installed in front of the Church of the Holy Ghost. It had to be relocated to St. Peter’s Church in 1966 after receiving complaints from locals that the artwork was “too depressing.”